Not ones to enjoy a slow paced life, we got off the plane at Heathrow after our flight from Lima with enough time to stop off for a bacon and egg fry up with grandma and grandpa before heading down to Brighton for the Quest reunion. Despite us flying around the world for it, sadly only 5 of our students made the effort to come (ungrateful *&$%%££$s!) but at least we got to play on the bouncy castle so it was all worth it in the end.
After enjoying a rare few days together, Matt headed down to Somerset to catch up with his family and then off to Brighton for a very successful Quest meeting with the British Standards people. I joined him briefly with a pretend fractured sesamoid which managed to get me out the karaoke evening but didn't see us getting out of signing up for another year with Quest. We're still not really sure how that happened!
Off we went for an extremely civilised Brimbles-Richards trip to Cat and Tobi's wedding in Switzerland. Beautiful views, s
unshine, cow bells and excellent company provided a wonderful weekend and a relaxing start to our time in Germany... which wasn't quite as relaxing. After Matt finding out that he had been offered a short term job working for Raleigh in Borneo (which took place during our holiday in Borneo), we also found out that the situation in the park in Bolivia and the road being built through it was a lot more serious than orginally thought and so a large part of our time was taken up reorganising our future, which now involves me flying back to Bolivia slightly earlier than expected (next week) and Matt staying in Borneo for over a month and joining me in Bolivia on Dec 1st. Matt’s time with his mates who came to visit provided a good distraction from all the stress and they filled four days with beer and sausages at the oktoberfest, whilst I enjoyed four days all to myself (heaven!), before hanging out with the Clelland seniors for a few days.After another manic week in England of organising and sorting it was finally ho
liday time! Although being in the UK and Germany was great, it didn’t really feel like a ‘holiday’ and so we headed off to Malaysian Borneo to visit Jim and enjoy a somewhat shorter version of the originally intended 3 week holiday (now only 9 days) The first couple of days we hung out with Jim in his beautiful 10th floor apartment with sea view (beats Valle Grande!!) and we both quickly fell in love with the area of Sabah – the food, the people, the beaches… and so we found ourselves regularly asking why are we going back to Bolivia and not Borneo??!!After hanging out with Jim, we transferred to the island of Mabul where we stayed for 4 days diving. The diving was INCREDIBLE. It’s difficult to say what the highlight was as t
here really were SO many: a school of over 20 reef shark, holding onto a rock for dear life during a really strong current whilst 100s of barracuda were swirling around 2m above with shark on the edge and garden eels everywhere poking there heads up, or the huge number of giant green sea turtles gliding silently through the water, or dozens of brightly coloured nudibranch and flat worms, or a rare blue ribbon eel, or flamboyant free swimming cuttlefish, or the gorgeous coral gardens, or a school of giant bumphead parrot fish… the list goes on. Our last dive how ever was perhaps the most special – my first night dive and Matt’s 200th dive, we saw the mandarin fish’s nesting spot, octopus, cuttlefish and so many weird and wonderful things, in addition to me experiencing my first ‘phosphorescence dancing’ session with Matt. It was a magical four days where we clocked up 14 dives!!
The next day we headed north to the village of Sukau, situated on the lower Kinabatangan river. We stayed in a beautiful lodge backing onto the river and went on a tranquil river cruise where we spotted numerous groups of long tailed macaques, two wild Orangutans (very cool) and group of Proboscis monkeys, including a mail giving one of his harem a bit of a ‘seeing to’! We also saw two of the highly acclaimed Hornbills (Rhinoceros and Asian pied) and a few Kingfisher birds. It was a wonderfully relaxed afternoon and it was incredible to see such pristine and untouched rainforest.
Before returning to Kota Kinabalu we visited the Sepilok Orangutan rehabilitation centre where we saw one of their feedings and took lots of rubbish photos. It was very interesting seeing a project similar to ours in someways (they rescue orphaned orangutans as a lot of the rainforest and the Orangutans natural habitat is being destroyed by the palm oil industry, and rehabilitate them and release them back into the wild). However, at the same time the project is so different as they have government backing and heaps of funding and support... two things we have in very short supply in Bolivia.
Now I'm back in the UK with my sis for a few days before heading back to the park for another year, and Matt's group of Junior Lawyers have just arrived for three weeks of installing a gravity water feed system in the northern Pitas district of Borneo. Huge apologies to those who I meant to catch up with whilst being back but have not managed to. It has been such a whirlwind stay and I can't quite believe we are already heading back.
Lots and lots of love to all and I will check back in from the deep Bolivian jungle asap,
sxx
